I’m currently looking to develop an open source app that can help somebody. I’m currently out of ideas, so I’d like to heard if from you guys.
Sorry if it seems to lazy to ask for ideas like that, I just thought that I could do it since the result will be a free app.
No, I’m not looking for an alternative. I’m looking for an open source client that let’s me talk to folks on WhatsApp.
I see, fair enough. I don’t know if you’ll have any luck with a FOSS third party client which does t violate their TOS. There was something on fdroid years ago, a wrapper that effectively allowed you to use WhatsApp Web on another phone (or perhaps even the same one), but it ultimately requried the use of the official clients
A closer analogy would be XMPP since that’s what whatsapp is based on.
The best open source client for it is Conversations for Android ($0 on F-Droid, $3 on google play except during christmas when it’s $0)
depends what you mean by closer – by features and ease of use, Matrix is the closest you can get to Whatsapp right now. XMPP is good, though!
No, I’m not looking for an alternative. I’m looking for an open source client that let’s me talk to folks on WhatsApp.
ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state
Edit: someones already mentioned these below… nevermind!
If youre in the EU then EU parliament forced whatsapp to start developing cross-app communications with Signal, telegram etc. (Source). This was in 2022 and was due to be released in March 2024. Im not sure where it got to though since i dont use whatsapp, though i might start asking some friends to see if its rolled out.
Alternatively there are “matrix bridges”. Namely via Matrix which can link messaging apps through matrix accounts and send messages between
This and so many others that are irreplaceable because of the Network effect. Google Maps, Uber and so on…
However if you are looking for a self contained app to bring into the Foss ecosystem then I would recommend making a game that you like?
My first game that I bought on Google Play was Osmos making a version of this that is open source would make me happy…
Support for all the hardware so we can quit using garbage Google-provided Android on every single phone instead of just the half-dozen or so phones some of these Free Android builds support. Amazing that I can install Linux on every single freaking configuration of PC that’s ever existed with a very tiny amount of systems not having support for all of its hardware even if said hardware has never been freed or even officially documented, but not with phones.
The damn things will still be a privacy nightmare because your cell signal tracks you everywhere you go, but at least we’d have a Free OS for everyone’s phone.
Xplore file browser
It’s trivial to replace the independent pieces of xplore, but it has so many features in one app that I just can’t let it go. It’s got dual pane file browsing, disk usage chart, smb, ftp, and many other cloud storage connections. It also handles many types of compression.
It’s become my main offline music player as well, because it has the simple ability to shuffle a folder of music, which is all I really need.
It can also view installed apps, export them to apk, and view and modify appdata (as non root!).
